For any organization operating a large number of facilities, managing those resources requires large amounts of time and money. In order to boost profits, an organization may desire to evaluate the number of facilities it operates and seek to save money by optimizing facilities based on various criteria, such as which consolidations would have the smallest impact on customer service, minimize risk, or generate the largest return on investment. An organization may spend large amounts of time determining whether or not to close a facility and what to do with the movable resources currently used by the facility, such as staff and equipment. To accomplish this, planners typically rely on large tabular reports full of numbers, which are unintuitive, difficult, and time-consuming to analyze. Many times, despite many hours of analysis, the facility-consolidation decision may not properly reflect return on investment, net present value, human resource issues, or long-term cost considerations. Often, these decisions may occur simply because the organization can easily move resources and capacity from one facility to another, not because the move efficiently uses resources or capital. This results in the loss of potentially higher savings.
Another aspect of facility management is efficient maintenance. A facilities manager with authority over several facilities in an area must deal with maintenance issues, such as repairing a broken air conditioner or leaky plumbing, occurring at the facilities he manages. These maintenance issues are typically managed in a time-ordered queue, based on when a maintenance complaint is received, and are sometimes modified by a priority consideration. However, such reactionary management methods cause inefficiencies. For example, a facility manager may employ an HVAC company to correct an AC problem in facility A on one day, and then employ the same HVAC company again the next day to correct a problem at facility B, because the two problem reports were separate in the time-ordered queue. This is inefficient because the HVAC company could have performed both jobs on the same day, likely reducing travel expenses and service call charges.
Therefore, it is desirable to introduce tools to help organizations manage multiple facilities, including identifying candidate facilities for closure and making sound, timely, and justifiable decisions about which facilities to close. It is also desirable to create tools that organize facility maintenance tasks, including taking advantage of economies of scale by consolidating maintenance tasks and realizing other efficiencies among multiple maintenance tasks.